What are some words you feel sound more right in both the American and British English?
I use a mix of the two depending on the word.
For example, I stand by pronouncing words like “Amazon” with an “ehn” sound at the end over an “ohn” sound, prefer spelling colour and flavour with a u, and also like using double Ls for words like travelling. Also, it is “grey”. (British English)
However, I pronounce Z as “zee”and call them fries rather than chips.
There are also spellings where I sort of alternate between depending on my mood, such as “meter” vs “metre”and“airplane” vs “aeroplane”
Are there any words that you think sound better in British and American spellings/pronunciations?
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I use a mix of the two depending on the word.
Hello, may I introduce you to Canadian English?
Yup. I use whatever feels best, which is usually American words, British spelling (except for the -ze instead of -se for words that end in a “z” sound).
Also, there are our own Canadianisms, like “washroom”.
Wait, everyone else doesn’t call in a washroom?
Heathens!
Washroom promotes the incorrect assumption that people wash their hands. Any time spent in a public latrine will show this to be inaccurate.
Water closet, on the other hand, tells you exactly what to expect. Cramped, likely too dark or too bright, and riddled with moisture of both expected and occult origin.
Water closet is the way.
Yeah, and bathroom suggests that there are baths or places for bathing.
Water closet really is the right thing to call it!
Compelling argument.
We call them bathrooms in the us
Eh?
Do you by any chance know where I could read a good introduction to Canadian English?
I can write fluently in UK and US English but Canadian sometimes has me stumped.
I’m not sure about online sources, but this is a solid reference book: https://editors.ca/publications/editing-canadian-english/
Thanks!
I prefer Traditional English over Simplified.
It’s “grey” not “gray”. I don’t know which side prefers which, I just know what I prefer.
They’re different words. Grey is more of a dark white, while gray is more of a light black.
But for real, to me grey is a name and a feeling, and gray is a color. And I have no idea why.
A big shout out to Oxford spelling which mixes American and English spelling and is incredibly hard to find a spell check for. It gives you all the extra u’s and z’s you could ask for.
Somehow even as a kid in America I always had a preference for the OED at my library. It just exuded this sense of supreme rightness to me.
Never occurred to me that normal grade school kids don’t all have a favourite dictionary. Ah well.
Oxford spelling, Oxford comma: what’s not to like?
Anything with a United Nations style spellcheck will sort it for you.
like I spell it as “centre” and it seems perfectly fine even though phonetically it doesn’t make much sense
Thanks to coding, I see center as a position and centre as an object. But for the most part, I find US spelling to be lazy spelling for poor pronunciation. Like people just started saying the word wrong and rather than fixing that, just started spelling it wrong too.
Aluminium is prob the weirdest. Like everything on the periodic table ending with -ium; the Latin morpheme in chemistry. But the US just-…like, how?!
The most noticeable for me are privacy /ˈpɹɪv.ə.si/ and urinal /juːˈɹaɪnəl/. I can’t say I feel any of them are right or wrong, though, it’s just a bit of colour in the language.
When I am talking about fibrous material, like individual strands of carbon in a composite, I naturally type “fibre” but when I talk about nutrition or the internet it’s “fiber”
I also tend to spell armor armour and color colour despite being American.
Oh and I write grey instead of gray.
I also catch myself writing units like metre and litre instead of meter and liter sometimes.
It really all depends on if there’s a spellchecker turned on that will tell me I’m spelling things wrong.
Colour and armour is insane especially if you’re American lol
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I think you’ll find everyone agrees that it should be fixed but no one wants to compromise on changing how they spell things.
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Going by how ortography changes have gone in other languages, I doubt it.
Besides English, if English fix its ortography it’s going to become much harder to learn for speakers of other European languages - as confusing the pronunciation rules and exceptions are, they are caused by writing things similarly to other European languages while mangling the original pronunciation.
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As a native Portuguese speaker I found it very useful when I started to learn English. And even nowadays having some form of “visual map” between English and Portuguese at least for more erudite words - which tend to be the ones that are shared between more languages - helps me write English better.
The similarities between English and German also ended up helping me learn German.
A silly colloquialism isn’t indicative of success. If you tell people to do something they don’t want to they’re not going to decide they actually like it later on.
There’s just no fucking way most Australians would decide to discard the current spelling of words in favor of the American spelling. I feel certain American’s feel the same about British spelling.
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Sure mate. I’m sure the engineers will step in and fix all the language problems any day now.
There’s often words that trip me up and I can’t remember which is the Australian English spelling.
It doesn’t help that devices are often misconfigured to use American English spell checkers.
I don’t “feel” as though different spellings are more correct in these cases.
I work in healthcare and it’s an append-i-cectomy not an appen-dectomy. It should have the i pronounced. The Americanised version is just lazy.
Schedule, I have to say the correct pronunciation every time I hear it said differently.
As the Countess in Roman Holiday tells us, either way is correct :-)
Me too. It’s the one word that triggers something in my brain.
I will spell out aluminium, but when I have to pronounce it I go with aluminum.
It was found in alum, so it should really have been alumium all along.
Wait? Do you guys not say your aed bed ceds?
Either is right for me and it entirely depends on whatever I’m vibing with at the time!
